“The nothing that is”: An Ethics of Absence Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (“The nothing that is”: Une éthique de l’absence, dans la poésie de Wallace Stevens)
par
Johanna Skibsrud
Département d'études anglaises Faculté des arts et des sciences
Thèse présentée à la Faculté des arts et des sciences en vue de l’obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.)
en études anglaises
January 2012 © Johanna Skibsrud, 2012
Université de Montréal Faculté des arts et des sciences
Cette thèse intitulée :
“The nothing that is”: An Ethics of Absence Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (“The nothing that is”: Une éthique de l’absence, dans la poésie de Wallace Stevens)
présentée par : Johanna Skibsrud
a été évaluée par un jury composé des personnes suivantes : Lianne Moyes président-rapporteur Eric Savoy directeur de recherche Elizabeth Oliver membre du jury Daniel O’Hara examinateur externe Représentant du Doyen Ugo Dion
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Cette thèse se concentre sur ce que j'appelle «l’espace négatif» de la représentation dans la poésie de Stevens comme étant un véritable espace d'engagement politique, une interprétation qui se distingue de la plus grande partie de la critique sur Stevens. En suivant les écrits philosophiques d'Emmanuel Levinas, j'affirme que l'emphase que Stevens place sur la représentation de la représentation elle-même ouvre un espace au-delà des limites rigides de l'identité-ce que Levinas appelle « le je [sujet] semblable », permettant un contact authentique avec « l'Autre» ainsi qu’avec le concept de « l'infini ». Bien que Stevens s’est farouchement opposé à la notion Romantique de la sublime transcendance, c’est-à-dire d'un espace censé exister en dehors des limites de l'imagination humaine, il se concerne
néanmoins avec l'exploration d'un espace au-delà de l'identité individuelle. Pour Stevens, cependant, « la transcendance» est toujours, nécessairement, liée par les restrictions reconnues du langage humain et de l'imagination, et donc par la réalité du monde perceptible. Toute « transcendance» qui est recherchée ou atteinte, dans la poésie de Stevens ne devrait donc pas - ma thèse affirme - être entendu dans le sens sublime
déterminé auparavant par les Romantiques. Une connexion plus appropriée peut plutôt être faite avec la transcendance concrète et immédiate décrit par Lévinas comme le «face à face ». L’attention que Stevens accordent aux notions concrètes et immédiates est souvent exprimé à travers son attention sur les qualités esthétiques de la langue. Sa poésie a en effet la poésie pour sujet, mais pas dans le sens solipsiste qui lui est souvent attribué. En se concentrant sur le processus actif et créateur inhérent à l'écriture et à la lecture de la poésie, Stevens explore la nature de l'Etre lui-même. Je compare cette exploration dans le travail de Stevens à celle du dessinateur, ou de l'artiste, et dans ma conclusion, je suggère les liens entre l'approche d'enquête de Stevens et celle d’artistes visuels contemporains qui se sont également engagés à la figuration du processus créatif. L’ artiste sud-africain William
Kentridge est mon exemple principal , en raison de sa conviction que la méthode est intrinsèquement liée à l'engagement politique et social.
Mots Clés: Littérature americain; Poésie; Philosophie; Wallace Stevens; Emmanuel
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This dissertation focuses on what I refer to as a “negative-space” of representation in the poetry of Wallace Stevens’s in order to explore what, contrary to the bulk of Stevens research to date, I understand to be a genuine politics of engagement. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that Stevens’s emphasis on the representation of representation itself opens up a space beyond the rigid limitations of identity—what Levinas refers to as the “I of the same”—allowing genuine contact with the concept of “the infinite,” or “the Other.” Though Stevens staunchly opposed himself to the Romantic notion of sublime transcendence—of a space purported to exist outside the limits of the human imagination—he nonetheless concerns himself with the exploration of just such a space “beyond” individual identity. For Stevens, however, “transcendence” is always, necessarily, bound by the acknowledged restrictions of human language and imagination and therefore by the reality of the perceivable world. Any “transcendence” that is sought, or achieved, in Stevens’s work should not, therefore, be understood in the
sublime sense intended by the earlier Romantics—a more apt connection can instead be made with the concrete and immediate transcendence described by Levinas as the “face to face.” Stevens’s concern for the concrete and the immediate is often expressed through his attention to the aesthetic qualities of language. His is indeed a poetry about poetry—but not in the limited, solipsistic sense that is often assumed. In concentrating on the active,
creative process inherent to writing and reading poetry, Stevens explores the nature of Being itself. I compare this exploration in Stevens’s work to that of the draftsman, or to the artist’s sketch, and in my conclusion suggest the connections between Stevens’s
investigative approach and contemporary visual artists who are also committed to the figuration of the creative process. South African artist William Kentridge provides my chief example, due to his conviction that the method is linked intrinsically to political and social engagement.
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Key Words: American literature; Poetry, Philosophy, Wallace Stevens, Emmanuel
Table of Contents
Résumé de synthèse...i
Abstract...iv
List of Chief Abbreviations...viii
List of Figures……….….…ix
Dedication...x
Acknowledgements ...xi
Introduction: “That which is always beginning”...1
Chapter One: The Eye...40
Chapter Two: The Image...85
Chapter Three: The Word…………... 131
Chapter Four: The Mind………...176
Chapter Five: The Act……….………….…209
Conclusion: “An unexplained completion”...260
viii List of Chief Abbreviations
AWE Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere
BPP Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
CL Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
CP Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
OG Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
OTB Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being
OU Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious
L Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens
MOP Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy
PL Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License
PLT Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language Thought
RF Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms
RL Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language
SELP Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems
SP John Ashbery, Selected Poems
TI Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
TMA Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are
List of Figures
Figure 1: Rosalind Krauss, “Klein Group.” The Optical
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Dedication
For John
What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed,
Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread, As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight
dithering,
The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave
A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace—
A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary, The way some first thing coming into Northern trees
Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South, The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in
spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected
magnitudes.
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I would like to express my gratitude to the professors I had the privilege of studying with at Université de Montréal, namely, Professor Lianne Moyes, Professor Amaryll Chanady, Professor Robert Schwartzwald, and Professor Taiwo Adetunji Asanubi. I would especially like to thank the late Professor Andrew John Miller, who believed in this project, and without whose support it may never have been written. Professor Eric Savoy’s guidance and
enthusiasm have also been indispensible to this project; I am grateful to his patience, keen insights, editorial comments, and endless encouragement. I would also like to thank Kelly MacPhail for his thoughtful editorial suggestions, and my cohort—Maude LaPierre and Jean-Francois Bernard. Their friendship over the last four years has been invaluable to me. My mother, Janet Shively, has, as always, been an incredible source of both practical and emotional support. I would like to thank her for her continued and devoted interest in my work, and her editorial suggestions for this project. Finally, I would like to thank my fiancé, John Melillo, to whom this project is dedicated, for his editorial comments, and unwavering support.
Introduction: “That which is always beginning”
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them
—Wallace Stevens (CP 906).
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“If…poetry,” Benedetto Croce asked in his 1933 Oxford lecture, “is intuition and expression, the fusion of sound and imagery, what is the material which takes on the form of sound and imagery?” Echoed in Wallace Stevens’s 1940 prose piece, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” this question is central to Stevens’s own investigations. The material structure of poetry—a concern, in other words, with language as such—would ever more urgently become Stevens’s chief poetic concern. Rather than offering language as a fact or an end in itself, however, Stevens concerns himself instead with what Croce, as if in reply to his own question, had asserted in 1930 constituted the true material essence of poetry:
[T]he whole man: the man who thinks and wills, and loves and hates; who is strong and weak, sublime and pathetic, good and wicked; man in the exultation and agony of living; and together with the man, integral with him, it is all nature in its
perpetual labour of evolution... Poetry... is the triumph of contemplation...Poetic genius chooses a straight path in which passion is calmed and calm is passionate (CP 652).
It is no surprise that Croce’s words sufficiently resonated with Stevens to include this quotation in full. Croce’s assertion exemplifies Stevens’s own conception of poetry as “the triumph of contemplation”—the route by which “man” may come to discover the fullness of his reality, replete with its chiasms and contradictions; in short, its resistance to being known at all. Poetry’s ability to expand and explore the intermediate spaces revealed among those chiasms and contradictions fundamental to human nature and experience is what allows it access—according to both Croce and Stevens—to the “fullness” of the real.
Contradiction, then—“a state or condition of opposition in things compared; variance;
inconsistency; contrariety” (OED, vol. II 916)—is as important to any understanding of Stevens’s poetics as the transcendence of that argument in a conceivable “whole.” This
project asserts that what emerges in Stevens’s work, in the absence of any positive solution or reply to the most fundamental questions of Being, is a negative-space of engagement and encounter with the representation of reality, and thus with Being itself. Though visual language and metaphor are central to Stevens’s poetry, and the term “negative-space” certainly plays on that, it is important to this project that the term be conceived neither as an image or a negative-image in any purely ocular sense, but instead as an exploration of the sensible space from which any given reality or image of that reality may arise.
Negative-space as it will be used in the following pages denotes the representation, in other words, of
the processes of representation itself, and therefore offers a grasp of the very structure of subjectivity. It should be conceived of as a speculative rather than an established or formal space—one that opens up the possibility of considering and confronting the processes of perception and understanding through which the concepts presence and absence, reality and the imagination, are formed—rather than constituting or delimiting the space of any one of these concepts as such.
What is an examination of “representation itself,” after all, but an exploration of the manner in which the world appears to, and is subsequently represented by, the subject—of the process, therefore, by which the subject continuously re-defines the limits of his own subjectivity? Maurice Blanchot, following Barthes, conceives of this continuous process of re-definition both materially and linguistically through what he calls the “stammer” of language1: “It is upon losing what we have to say that we speak” (21), he writes in The
Writing of the Disaster. For Blanchot, as for Barthes, the generative source of both
language and Being can be located in this absent, intermediate space at the centre of the
1“Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality” writes Barthes in “The Rustle of Language” (RL 76). It is
constituted by “singular annulations-by-addition,” which “condemns” it to “stammering” (77). Somewhat differently, but laying equal weight on the necessarily repetitive process-oriented nature—this time of written language—Barthes writes in “Right in the Eyes” that “a sign is what repeats itself. Without repetition there is no sign, for we could not recognize it, and recognition establishes the sign” (RL 237).
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repetitive structure of language—between what we have to say (due to either obligation or desire) and the spoken. This perpetual state of prolepsis that Blanchot evokes as the (absent) core of language combines both an anticipatory, desirous and reactive state—that which is endlessly propelled forward, like a stutter, in the hopes of correcting what has already been said and simultaneously beginning again what one had wanted to say—and the Epicurean or Stoic concept of a state of consciousness that arises independent of any conscious desire: a thought, that is, provoked not by intellectual but rather by sense perception. Likewise, Stevens’s poetry is deeply concerned with the relationship between these two states—so much so that in a letter to Bernard Heringman of 1953 he referred to the persistent play on this relation in his work as his “reality-imagination complex” (L 792). As Frank Doggett affirms, however, for Stevens there was no real conflict; unlike the philosophers, he would continue throughout his career to put his “final trust in sentience” (Doggett 142). Stevens, Doggett writes, “is governed by the inherent bias of the poet for the body’s faith in the palpable certainty of the world of immediate experience” (142). His work is invested in, and embedded within, an intellectual and philosophic tradition, but the
root of the intellectual and philosophic for Stevens is always sentient2, and based on
individualized and experiential contact with the world. Ultimately, it was always the imagination that was, for Stevens, “the liberating faculty in a deterministic world” (Peterson 52).
Yet Stevens was never interested in disorienting and subverting the empirical faculties as was often the ambition of the Symbolists—a poetic method once described by Rimbaud as a “long, intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses”
2 The internal ambiguity of the term “sense” is in itself interesting here. The word is potentially inclusive of
everything from the vaguest impressions received by the senses to the most carefully considered and contrived intellectual activity; from the most deeply entrenched use-values of signs and language to the most “innate” and presumably uninstructed reactions to, and interpretations of, practical situations.
(Peyre 34). Stevens’s concern was instead for what he saw to be the integral relationship
among reality, sense perception, and the imagination. Margaret Peterson argues that, in
essence, it is an “adaptation of Coleridge’s faculty psychology” that is at the root of Stevens’s “effort to reinstate poetry in the ‘center of consciousness’ as the ‘sum of our faculties,’” and she interprets Stevens’s primary poetic ambition to be, therefore, the reassertion of Coleridge’s claim that the imagination “brings the whole soul of man into activity” (52).3 Stevens’s reiteration of Croce’s Oxford lecture in “The Noble Rider” would indeed suggest this most plainly. In addition, Stevens’s emphasis on perception as “a
bilateral rather than a unilateral activity” (Hill 3)4 confirms his allegiance to a sensibility (worthily represented by Coleridge) that emerged within the context of the empirical tradition advanced by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume (Hill 3). Finally, the much-identified concern for the integration of poetry and philosophy in Stevens’s work can
3 In Chapter XIV of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria he defines poetry in the following way: “My own
conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and imagination [in Chapter XIII]. What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet’s own mind. A poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis [it is carried onwards with loose reins]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry […] Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. (180)
4John Spencer Hill characterizes Coleridge’s conception of sense experience as “a stimulus that evokes a
response and involves (to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth) ‘A balance, an ennobling interchange of action from within and from without.’” “Thus the product in any given act of perception,” he continues, “is a modified combination of the percipient and the thing-perceived and is, as Coleridge asserts in Biographia Chap xii, neither a subject (perceiver) nor an object (thing-perceived) exclusively, but rather the most original union of both. In and through the act of blending ‘thoughts’ and ‘things,’ the (primary) Imagination
functions as a fusing, synthesizing power -- an esemplastic power whose operation generates a new reality by shaping parts into wholes, by reconciling opposites and drawing unity from diversity” (3).
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also be usefully traced back to the Romantics.5 Although his lineage is, therefore,
undeniably Romantic, Stevens—as he himself, as well as plenty of critics who doggedly defend him as “the quintessential modernist poet” (Thrift 52, emphasis added) would be quick to remind us—was not. Indeed, Stevens sharply distinguished himself from the Romantic tradition as well as from any religious or transcendentalist influence. Though he wrote in “a time of disbelief,” that time was also “a time of truth-loving” (CP 849). The parameters of “truth” were firmly established, for Stevens, within the immediate world of “men”—men who, in the absence of “belief,” turn to “a fundamental glory of their own and from that create a style of bearing themselves in reality...a new style of a new bearing in a new reality” (CP 844).
In the preface to Williams’ Collected Poems, Stevens wrote, “All poets are, to some extent, romantic poets” (CP 770), but in a review of Marianne Moore’s work, published in
Life and Letters To-day in December 1935, he clarified this statement, explaining that he
meant:
the romantic in the other sense, meaning always the living and at the same time the imaginative, the youthful, the delicate and a variety of things which it is not
necessary to try to particularize at the moment, constitutes the vital element in poetry. It is absurd to wince at being called a romantic poet. Unless one is that, one is not a poet at all. (CP 778)
This said, he had no tolerance for “metaphysical” pretensions, nor for a “humanism” that he suspected merely substituted the restrictive terms of institutionalized religion with new, equally restrictive, terms. His opposition to the rigidity of the Church is well known. “Reply to Papini” (1950) provides an obvious example of Stevens’s views, where in
5 “The Romantic poets wrote about philosophy by writing about poetry,” writes Paul Hamilton. He identifies a
reaction against “Empiricist metaphors” as the cause of what he (rather short-sightedly) terms this “unusual complicity” (29).
uncharacteristically programmatic terms, he attacks institutionalized religion and proposes a substitution: the more elastic and accommodating approach of the poet.
Stevens’s opinions aside, Harold Bloom’s characterization of him as the single modern bearer of the Romantic tradition has had a lasting influence, albeit one that many contemporary critics have found as arbitrary as it is limiting. In his study of Wallace Stevens’s relation to the “literary canons” John Timberman Newcomb objects to Bloom’s interpretation of Stevens as having “forsak(en) the image”—claiming that the analysis was “created for the critic’s own purposes” and demonstrates only a very narrow understanding of the work as a whole. The objection is underscored by Newcomb’s observation that the quotation Bloom chose in order to establish his “anti-Imagist” argument (a quotation from “Esthetique de Mal” that begins: “The greatest poverty is not to live/ In a physical world” [CP 286]) “actually appeared to affirm the physicality and corporeality of this world—a habit of Stevens’s which Bloom acknowledged at other points in the book” (222). Too often, as the debate between Bloom and Newcomb shows, the enthusiastic defense of Stevens’s work according to the guiding principles of one group or style of criticism, or against the claims of another, results in the willful dismissal of much of the poetry’s richness and complexity.
Perhaps the most common mistake that is repeatedly made by Stevens scholars is to polarize the philosophic and poetic concerns of the work. Critics who accuse Stevens on the one hand of being too philosophical for poetry and on the other for being too poetic for philosophy risk missing the point.6 The intermediary space that Stevens’s poetry seeks to
6 In her discussion on Stevens’s relationship with his philosophical influences, whom she identifies as
Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson, William James, and George Santayana, Margaret Peterson states that “it is difficult to specify relevant ideas in an area (modern philosophy) in which Stevens managed to be unspecific with remarkable consistency” (60). She resignedly announces, therefore, that “the most that can be hoped for is some grasp (admittedly limited) of the relation between Stevens’s aesthetic problem and the modern development of the problem of knowledge as it bears upon the idealist tradition” (60). I would attest that the
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establish between empirical knowledge and sensory experience should not be understood in positive, additive terms—“a little of this, a little of that”—making it possible, therefore, to isolate one thing from the other and argue over percentage values, but instead as a
negative-space from which, or against which both the philosophical and poetic concerns of the work
arise. It is not, in other words, a space of “the said” but of, as Blanchot puts it, “the
wanting to say, the saying,” from which, or against which, “the said” can be observed to
emerge. Put still differently—this time in the words of the painter, Paul Klee—Stevens’s object is not “to render the visible, but to render visible” (Deleuze, FB 40). The space within which “visibility” is rendered is a space that does not and cannot exclude the intellect, but is, more properly, as Klee’s dictum suggests, the native space of the senses.
For Stevens, no sense figures more prominently than the sense of sight. More like a painter’s sketch than a philosopher’s or even a poet’s discerning and singular choice of the signifying word, what is most important for Stevens is not the representation of the “seen,” but the development of a space from or against which a consciousness of the process through which that which is “render(ed) visible” might arise. It is this concentration on the sensory information through and against which we arrive at our knowledge of the world and our place within it—any depiction of which can only mark, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “the edge/ Of one of many circles” (CP 76)—that gives rise to the negative-space of representation in Stevens’s poetry explored throughout this project. The elaboration of this space affords Stevens and his readers the opportunity to consider language intimately, and at its deepest level, revealing the ethical space of both difference and contact—between the speaking “I” and the “Other” against which the “I” is spoken— that constitutes the heart of signification and representation itself.
“limitations” are here delineated by an insistence on reading Stevens within and against the rigid, rationalist structures of a philosophic tradition his poetry specifically sought to subvert and transcend.
The Letter as Such
Stevens’s lifelong interest and identification with the contemporary art world is testament to the benefits of considering his work in terms of a process of visual figuration, but even more crucial to this project is the figuration within Stevens’s work of the
processes of figuration itself. Through the use of this technique Stevens pushes past the
representing figure—the speaking “I”—toward the “Other” who exists, necessarily, beyond the limits of the “I”’s capacity for representation. Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking is
particularly useful to developing these considerations, but—as many critics such as Richard A. Macksey have justly warned, there is both “a peculiar temptation to enlist analogies from the philosophers in reading Wallace Stevens’s poetry—and a peculiar danger” (191). Some of these dangers are made evident enough by Stevens’s own remarks, cited above, regarding his resistance to “metaphysics”: albeit a “thinking” poet, he is, he insists, above all, a poet. Nonetheless, to restrict an analysis of Stevens’s work strictly to language and the text itself is just as dangerous; essential to any thorough approach to Stevens’s work is, I believe, the conscientious attempt to establish a ground of reading as concordant as possible with the ground he himself tried so hard to establish for his writing: a ground of “reality” that would be inclusive of, but not limited to, the world of language and the imagination.
This project focuses on Stevens’s relationship with the materiality of language, but just as Heidegger developed his “tool analysis” in Being and Time, not to analyze tools in themselves, but as part of a greater project that had to do with our manner of living and being in the world as a whole, so the emphasis placed on the function and material of language in Stevens’s poetry is only a “part” of what Stevens endeavoured to explore. His minute analysis of both the possibilities and impossibilities of sound and meaning through
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an emphasis on the “letter as such” (“The never rounding O,” “the dominant X”), and the introduction into his text of nonsense and foreign words (“Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “Lol-lolling the endlessness of poetry” [391])—both of which draw attention to the surface or “aesthetic” features of his poetry—has led many critics, especially in the work’s initial reception, to dismiss Stevens as an “aesthete” or “hedonist.”7 This emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of language is crucial to Stevens’s larger aim, but it is indeed only a “part” of it. As Macksey writes, what Stevens confronts in his work is, in proper Hegelian fashion, “pure Being.” Though “it vanishes before his attention”—displaced by what Macksey terms “its antithesis, the nothingness which is to play an increasingly vital role in his thought”—Stevens does manage, according to Macksey, and the Hegelian formulation of the dialectic, to finally locate through his poetry:
the concrete synthesis of Being and Not-Being in Becoming, the dynamism of both his worlds which saves the one from the curse of changelessness and propels the other ceaselessly toward the ‘ultimate poem’ which is always one concept to its contrary, from thesis to antithesis, and then to union. (190)
Indeed, change and movement are so fundamental to Stevens’s poetry that for him the danger is in becoming too reliant on this imagery—on “change” itself becoming a static form in his work. What alleviates this is his corresponding interest in and impulse toward
exteriorization, toward the figuration of a space wherein, in Levinas’s words, “absolute
exteriority presents itself in expressing itself, in a movement at each instant recovering and
7 As Joseph N. Riddel has observed, “If anything distinguished the popular criticism of Stevens it is this
insistence that his poetry was disengaged from reality, was “hermetic art.” Although Eliot was also, contemporaneously, considered “a dandy, a wit,” his apocalyptic mode, along with his professed admiration of Laforgue and Baudelaire, permitted his poetry to be perceived to have “brought the age into critical focus even as it detached the poetic self from the age’s chaos.” Stevens’s “hedonism” on the other hand was perceived of as “invading language, (it) made such beautiful music that it destroyed meaning. This withdrawal of self into the imagination’s finery, it appeared, denied him the privilege of facing the age objectively and critically. His detachment took the form of irresponsible escape.” (251)
deciphering the very signs it emits” (OTB 172). His challenge, therefore, was to find a method of imag(in)ing movement in his work that would not reduce that movement to static form (to words or images alone), but would at the same time be brought to the fore; indeed, be imaged, thus resisting an equally alluring retreat into a nebulous and ultimately solipsistic interior space. He would strike this balance most convincingly in his last collection, The Rock; here, movement is rendered not for its own sake, but for the sake of the immediate ethical encounter effected through radical exteriorization, an emphasis on the signifying element of language and representation as such8.
The Same and the Other
Emmanuel Levinas’s interrogation into the question of representation as the space of contact between the “I” of “the Same” and the “Other”9—a relation which, in the opening chapter of Totality and Infinity, he asserts “is language” (39)—will be a crucial touch-point for this project as it is precisely this space that Stevens works to elaborate within his own work. Where Levinas is interested in uncovering and exploring representation at a primordial level (the manner in which subjectivities approach,
8 According to Derrida in Of Grammatology, “The exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in
general. […] Without that exteriority, the very idea of the sign falls into decay” (14). In our epoch, Derrida explains, writing is always secondary, “preceded by truth.” The “literal” meaning of writing is
“metaphoricity itself.” The signifier is thus always outside, external to, the truth, the signified, and that exteriority is essential to its function as signifier. The “totality” of the signifier can never be a totality, “unless a totality constituted by the signifier preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in ideality” (18). The essential point here is that the idea of exteriority is crucial to the possibility of its opposite: interiority. The “exterior” allows for an “inside,” and thus for the meaningfulness, of signification.
9 In Totality and Infinity Levinas clarifies what he means by “the Same”: “The I is not a being that always
remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity through all that happens to it. It is the primal identity, the primordial work of identification” (36). That which interrupts the “I” and thus defines its subjectivity “is the Other.” Of this entity, Levinas writes: “He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I.’ I, you—these are not individuals in a common concept. Neither possession nor unity of number nor the unity of concepts links me to the Stranger [l’Etranger], the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi]. But stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my sight. But I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him, without genus. We are the same and the other. The conjunction and here
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appropriate and reflect what exists as “Other,” beyond the limits of their particular sensibilities) Stevens explores representation at the level of the text (the manner in which the speaker arrives at his ideas and perceptions and that the poem, therefore, arrives at its content). In order to elaborate this perceptual space, however, Stevens also—necessarily— grapples with the primordial questions of representation engaged by Levinas.
In order for a subject to understand itself as “being” a subject at all, writes Levinas, it must first “signify.” This signification is based on the primordial relationship of the “I” to the “Other,” which is at the root of sensibility, and thus representation. In Otherwise Than
Being this relationship is explored by Levinas in depth. He explains: “This changing of
being into signification, that is, into substitution, is the subject’s subjectivity, of its
subjection to everything, its susceptibility, its vulnerability, that is, its sensibility” (14). It is this very primordial “breakup of identity”—which constitutes subjectivity itself—that is, for Levinas, the very definition of “ethics.” “Responsibility for the other,” he expounds, “in its antecedence to my freedom, its antecedence to the present and to representation, is a passivity more passive than all passivity, an exposure to the other without this exposure being assumed, an exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying” (15). In the extremity of its passivity and exposedness, the subject is always-already a representation or “expression” of itself for the other. It is this being “for the other” that is being at all, but it is a responsibility “that goes beyond being,” and remains, even “in its activity, a passivity, more passive than all passivity, for it is a sacrifice without reserve” (OTB 15). Being is defined by Levinas, in other words, by what is always beyond
being, impossible to articulate, but nevertheless always implicit, indeed at the root of, the
processes of representation by which and through which it is defined. Ethics is precisely that which refuses representation, the negative-space of every subjectivity, the originary
fracturing of that which lies beyond signification from and against which the signified is constituted.
It is precisely this space that Stevens works, through his poetry, not to define but to expose. Even his pronouncement in his posthumously published notebooks, that “[e]thics are no more a part of poetry than they are of painting” (904), reveals despite (indeed
because of) its insistence on a negative construction of the relationship among poetry,
painting and ethics, a shared space of relationship among them. In fact, bringing the three together in this pronouncement is testament to the fact that—though it is by no means defined, and indeed is here half-heartedly denied—the relationship existed for Stevens. This project endeavours to open up the space of this relation in Stevens’s poetry in terms of what is common to all three: an engagement with the “Other” through the processes of representation itself.
A major difference exists, however, between the negative-space of representation in the visual arts and the negative-space fundamental to Stevens’s poetics. In contrast to the way that the particular arises within a painting or photograph—even in the most abstract of images—against the negative-space of what it is not, Stevens attempts the reverse. He focuses on the particular—the image, the letter, the word; what has, in short, already been “render(ed) visible”—in order to gain access to that which exceeds the visible. Through a focus on the particularly, materiality and functionality of language, Stevens attempts to locate a method by which the ultimate passivity of representation itself—in the words of Blanchot, a “time without present, (an) I without I” (15)— might be confronted and explored. The goal for Stevens is to grasp the particular at the point where it marks, like an absent blackbird, the edge of an endless continuance of spiralling circles—not in order to depict or fix that edge, or the circles themselves, but in order to figure the process of that ever-outward, ever-continual, spiral of perception and representation. This is a process that
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is, after all, the very work of being, and also therefore of ethics: the work of perceiving, filtering, identifying, and eventually (in one form or another) addressing one’s experiences to “the Other.”
Another name for the figuration of this process is, of course, as Levinas and others have pointed out, language.10 Just as it was delineated at the beginning of his career in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Stevens’s project was to discover a space in which to explore representation through a “render(ing) visible” of language itself, accomplished by investigating and accounting for both the sensory experience of the eye and the intellectual filtering processes of the mind. Language, for Stevens, like vision, is a collaborative activity of both the intellect and the senses. An exploration of language therefore reveals the integral relationship between body and mind, reality and imagination.
World and Thing
Consistent with Martin Heidegger’s formulation of “world” and “thing,” whereby a mutual penetration results in an intermediate space of what Heidegger terms their “dif-ference,”11 Stevens’s poetry is characterized by the constant inter-penetration between
10 “It is supplementarity,” according to Derrida, “that constitutes the property [propre] of man,” and makes
possible “speech, society, passion, etc” (OG 244). That is, it is not the sign, but the possibility of the sign’s repetition that pre-figures language. “But,” we might ask, along with Derrida, “what is this property [propre] of man? On the one hand, it is that of which the possibility must be thought before man, and outside of him. Man allows himself to be announced to himself after the fact of supplementarity, which is thus not an attribute—accidental or essential—of man. For on the other hand, supplementarity, which is nothing, neither a presence nor an absence, is neither a substance nor an essence of man. It is precisely the play of presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend. Therefore this property [propre] of man is not a property of man: it is the dislocation of the proper in general. […] Man
calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of
animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without différance (OG 244).
11 Heidegger’s ference” is, of course, a precursor of Derrida’s “différance.” Heidegger uses the term
“dif-ference” in his essay, “Language” to discuss the “separation of the between” in the intimate relationship between “world” (“the ever non-objective”[PLT 43]) and “thing” (the object, that which is “not simply nothing”[PLT 21]; “something always already there”[PLT 22]). He writes: “In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference” (PLT 199). It is important to Heidegger that the word used to describe this in-between space is “removed from its usual and customary
several seeming dichotomies: “reality” (the sensory world understood through the
intellectual processes of the mind) and “the imagination” (an intermediate zone into which sensory input is received and the intellectual processes, including language, take place); the “peculiar” and the “general;” and the “minor” (or “singular”) and the “major” man. Again, in his preface to Williams’ Collected Poems, Stevens would write: “Something of the unreal is necessary to fecundate the real; something of the sentimental is necessary to fecundate the anti-poetic” (CP 770). The development of Stevens’s own work traces his efforts toward establishing a tangible space in which to figure a “Reality” that would be inclusive of these contradictions. His is an exploration of Being itself as neither “real” nor “imaginary,” “peculiar” nor “general,” but instead—moving beyond an ultimately
solipsistic enquiry into the possibilities and limitations of the Cartesian cogito—a space of Levinasian encounter between the speaking “I” and the “Other.”12 Stevens figures a space, that is, of transcendence, though not in any religious or, as he once wrote, “derogatory” Romantic sense (CP 778). As is the case for Levinas’s thinking, “transcendence” in relation to Stevens’s poetry must be understood in a positive, but ultimately limited, sense—bound always by the restrictions of human imagination and therefore by the reality of the
perceivable world—within the space of a consideration of language and representation
usage” (PLT 200). Derrida takes this further, insisting that différance “is literally neither a word nor a concept” (MOP 3). It is instead a movement—a continual displacing/displacement of the trace, which opens a temporal interval, but also a spatial one. It is crucial that the substitution of an a for an e “remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be [apprehended] in speech, and […] bypasses the order of apprehension in general” (MOP 3-4). It is always an opening, and always in motion; it can never be grasped. Derrida even goes so far as to suggest that his différance refers “to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility” (MOP 5), and “derives from no category of being, whether present or absent” (MOP 6). This is certainly not far from Heidegger’s sense of “dif-ference” as that “which is neither distinction nor relation,” a “dimension” that “no longer means a precinct already present independently in which this or that comes to settle” (PLT 200), but Derrida goes even farther to insist upon the absolute alterity of his term.
12 This is an argument that has been suggested by critic David Jarraway in his 1993 publication Wallace
Stevens and the Question of Belief. In his commentary on Stevens’s poem “The Countryman,” Jarraway cites
Levinas’s view that “a work conceived radically is a movement of the same toward the Other which never returns to the same” (289). The implications of this statement and the drive in Stevens’s work toward an exteriorization which is simultaneously a drive toward encounter with the “Other” in this Levinasian sense remains to be more comprehensively explored.
16 itself. Because of this, it will be useful to again turn to Levinas for a more explicit
vocabulary with which to express the particular quality of “transcendence” that is unremittingly sought and, by times, achieved, through Stevens’s poetry. It is a
“transcendence” that should be understood neither in high Romantic, nor in the hyperbolic high Modernist terms implemented by Newcomb to describe the modern poet’s “overriding ‘need’… to establish a space of transcendence in the absence of gods” which drives him deeper and deeper into the “yawning emptiness of the self” (Newcomb 220-221), but instead in Levinasian terms of the “face to face.”13
Language as Desire
The positive deployment of (the) pacific relation with the other, without frontier or any negativity, is produced in language. Language does not belong among the relations that could appear through the structures of formal logic; it is contact across distance, relation with the untouchable, across a void. It takes place in the
dimension of absolute desire by which the same is in relation with an other that was not simply lost by the same. (TI 172)
Levinas’s formulation of language as a space of desire can also be exceptionally illuminating when brought to bear on the negativity at the root of much of Stevens’s poetry. This negativity is perhaps most complexly explored, and therefore also particularly striking, in the later post-war collections, Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock (1954). The negative-space that is achieved in these collections through further emphasis on the processes of representation itself—processes as equally
13 “The notion of the face...makes possible the description of the notion of the immediate. The philosophy of
the immediate is realized neither in Berkeley’s idealism nor in modern ontology. To say that the existent is disclosed only in the openness of Being is to say that we are never directly with the existent as such. The immediate is the interpellation and, if we may speak thus, the imperative of language. The idea of contact does not represent the primordial mode of the immediate. Contact is already a thematization and a reference to a horizon. The immediate is the face to face” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 52)
inclusive of the represented object or idea as the sensory material and intellectual practices from which that object or idea arises—provides an opportunity for the investigation of language as part of the more fundamental structure of desire described by Levinas. This is not a space of “seeing or grasping” (which, as Levinas explains, are modes merely of “enjoyment, sensibility, and possession” [OTB 172]), but instead that space where
“absolute exteriority presents itself in expressing itself” (OTB 172). It is a space, in other words, wherein what can at any time be “seen” or “grasped” by the limited senses is exposed. This allows for the “transcendence” of those limitations through the same excessive desire by which they (and thus sensibility itself) are defined, as well as the potential figuration of that state of prolepsis Blanchot describes as the very (absent) core of language.
Indeed, Stevens charges that the true measure of a poet is not the measure of his power to “grasp” or delimit anything in a positive sense, but “his power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist” (CP 657). The poet, Stevens insists, “must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination” (CP 657). The absorbent space of the imagination that Stevens evokes here functions as a space of “transcendence” in which “truth”—the immediate and absolute exteriority of the world and our experience within it— is made accessible not at the remove of mere “enjoyment, sensibility, or possession” but instead through genuine contact and reflection.
“The pressure of reality”
Stevens’s “Noble Rider”—although echoing the words of Croce’s Oxford Lecture as cited above—begins with the words of another philosopher, Plato, whom Stevens also quotes at length. The passage is from the Phaedrus and describes the soul as a composite
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figure of a pair of winged horses (one noble, one ignoble) and a charioteer. In describing the method by which we are seized by Plato’s description (identifying immediately with the charioteer) but then soon dropped from the sky, the images dissolving in the realization of their ultimate unreality, Stevens asserts:
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be
extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have. In Plato’s figure, his imagination does not adhere to what is real. On the contrary, having created something unreal, it adheres to it and intensifies its unreality.14(CP 645) For Stevens, it is not so much, as this excerpt endeavours to explain, that there exists a visible hard and fast distinction between the “real” and the “unreal,” but rather that the “unreality” to which Plato has affixed his images must also be understood as a part of “reality.” “Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere,” (CP 644) Stevens writes—an idea compellingly rendered in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “Everything as unreal as real could be, // In the inexquisite eye” (CP 399). For Stevens, as usual, what is at stake is a question not of “real” or “unreal,” but of the process of
figuration: the process by which that perceived as “real” or “unreal” is interpreted and
conveyed. Understood in this sense, “unreal” things (that is, those things invisible to the “inexquisite eye”—“inexquisite” here meaning that which has not been selected or chosen
14 In Derrida’s discussion of this work in his important early essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” he interrogates the
play of language in the Plato’s text, a play that Plato himself was only partially in control of. Derrida metaphorically refers to writing in this essay as a “pharmakon”—a word that, in Greek, can mean both drug or poison, can imply either the cure for or the cause of a disease. “The word pharmakon is caught in a chain of significations” (ADR 124), writes Derrida, and “no absolute privilege allows us absolutely to master its textual system” (ADR 125). Writing is always tied to the central ambiguity by which it is represented in
Phaedrus, always-already cloaked in mythos and betraying its fundamental metaphoric structure. “The god of
writing is thus also a god of medicine,” writes Derrida (ADR 123). In just this way, Stevens highlights the ambiguous relationship between imagination and reality. There is no way of unraveling the one from the other, “no absolute privilege” that would allow us to master the system within which the two are united, no ultimate “Reality” that could provide the key to the puzzling metaphoricity at the root of the relationship between the two.
by the intellect) have just as much potential as “real” things for being figured palpably enough to adhere to Stevens’s more expansive and general sense of the “real.” “Reality,” that is, “as a thing seen by the mind:
Not that which is but that which is apprehended, a mirror, a lake of reflections in a room,
A glassy ocean lying at the door. (CP 399)
It was imperative for Stevens, throughout his career, that imagination and reality be considered in dialectical relation to one another, as vital parts of a potentially synthetic space of inter-action. The “idea of nobility” in art, which Stevens delineates in “The Noble Rider,” had all but disappeared in his estimation due to the mistaken privileging in
contemporary society of an impoverished sense of phenomenal “reality” over the life of the mind and the value of the contemplative imagination. If the early to mid twentieth century art world familiar to Stevens had, indeed, retained any sense of the “nobility” Stevens describes, it was only in “degenerate forms or in a much diminished state” due to a “failure in the relation between the imagination and reality” (CP 649, emphasis added). This failure was attributable in turn to what Stevens refers to in “The Noble Rider”—in a phrase that would echo resoundingly through subsequent generations of artists, its influence renewed in the 1950s by the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States—as “the pressure of reality” (CP 650). In the artistic realm of the 1930s and 1940s, this “pressure,” which Stevens describes as resulting from “an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation,” resulted not so much from the occurrence of any singular “external event” in itself (though the economic and political atmosphere of the day, cannot, of course, be separated from the production and concerns of the working artists) but from the cultural reaction to this strain. This reaction contributed to the exaltation and popularization of a literature of social realism, which defined the styles of a much wider and more various array of artists than merely those who, like Theodore Dreiser and Upton
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Sinclair, identified stylistically as “social realists,” or those associated, in the realm of the visual art, with either the Ashcan school or the later “regionalist” style typified by Thomas Hart Benton.
“Social Realism”—the depiction of the gritty reality of working class life in the 1930s and 1940s—had indeed become the dominant mode of perceiving and thinking about art and the world. Those working in between the two World Wars were hard pressed, as Stevens observed, to conceive of the task of the artist as other than a direct medium for the immediate, visible world that surrounded him.15 The reaction to the “pressure” of this reality, and the obvious limits to artistic representation that it posed, was various. One striking example was the poet George Oppen, who would give up poetry for a span of thirty years from the 1930s until the 1960s, because of his conviction that the political pressures of his time bore more obvious and immediate weight—as well as the fear that his having given way (necessarily, as he saw it) to a more “pressing” political reality would make him a writer of “bad poetry—poetry tied to a moral or a political (same thing) judgement” (66). Later, Oppen would return to poetry, in part from a sense of defeat in the political realm (“I...returned to poetry only when we knew that we had failed” [quoted in Nicholls 40], he once wrote), but also from a new sense of optimism born of his realization, through poetry, of a means with which he might “rediscover” politics—“this time in the ‘existential’ world of being and making rather than in that other world in which ‘knowledge’ had been
devalued to the currency of surveillance” [Nicholls 42]).
15 “When I was at Harvard, a long time ago,” recounts Stevens in his 1936 Harvard address, “it was a
commonplace to say that all the poetry had been written and all the paintings painted” (CP 783). Robert Buttell comments that Stevens’s conception was that poetry had begun around that time to seem “less and less significant in a world of science, industrialism, and middle class culture. The Decadent’s response was to establish a cult of isolated beauty” (Stevens’s mentor Santayana, with whose thinking Stevens would always sit uncomfortably, would fall in this camp), “while at the opposite extreme the realistic and naturalistic novelists were making a determined effort to deal with the actual world, as sordid as it might be” (Pearce and Miller 29).
What gave Oppen cause for cautious hope with his return to poetry in the 1960s, however—with a new formula by which he conceived that the “pressure of reality” (CP 650) might be integrated with the generative potency of the imagination16—was one that Stevens had been working out since the days of Harmonium (1923). What Stevens referred to as his “reality-imagination complex” (L 792) indeed formed the generative thrust of his poetry from the beginning of his career. The space of their interpenetration—the emphasis placed, that is, on neither “reality,” nor the “imagination,” but instead on the shared
negative-space of sensibility and representation between them—is explored, however, with greater and greater intensity as his career progresses.
A Necessary Angel
Though I will continue, throughout this project, to rely on the use of word
“between”—which is unfortunately suggestive of a separately delineated “third space”—it is crucial to remember that the negative-space that provided the generative source for Stevens’s poetry throughout his career should not be considered a separate space at any final remove from the conflict between “imagination” and “reality.” It should also be kept firmly in mind that the investigation of this space is not geared finally toward any
“solution” (or to use the language of “The Rock,” a “cure”) to the conflict it seeks to encompass and embody. Instead, it serves to articulate a hyphenated space of “dif-ference” between imagination and reality, time and space. Indeed, it strives to articulate the very chiastic interval wherein imagination exists as reality and reality as the imagination, where space is encountered as time and time is encountered as space. The particular relevance of Levinas’s thinking in relation to this opening of a space between these tightly interlocked
16 “Poetry has to be protean,” wrote Oppen in a letter to his sister June dated 1959, “meaning must begin
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concepts is that for him, as for Stevens, it is never simply a question of dialectics. The exploration of this chiastic interval between reality and the imagination, as between subjects, is an ethically charged movement toward contact and comprehension.
In his useful essay, “Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination”— which laid to rest the last lingering suspicions of a legitimate correspondence between Stevens work and the French Symbolists—Michel Benamou remarks that where Baudelaire remembers a world “before the fall,” Stevens projects an “Adamic hopefulness”; that where Mallarmé sought out a land of the mind “beyond reality,” Stevens sought “a land beyond the mind, as part of reality” (92). Disillusion is described by Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as “the last illusion.” His “fiction of the absolute” strives to move past even this, to rid itself of the apocalyptic rhetoric of his era, not necessarily in order to assert a new vision or an optimism for the future, but in order to access the space in which our realities—that is, our disillusions as equally as our illusions—are made.
Stanley Burnshaw’s infamous dismissal of Stevens’s long-awaited second volume of poetry, Ideas of Order, in the October 1935 issue of New Masses, has had lasting influence on Stevens criticism—though, over seventy-five years later, it has itself been dismissed countless times, and even renounced by the author himself.17 Burnshaw, who had
17 In his preface to the review (reprinted in The Stanley Burnshaw Reader in 1990), Burnshaw insists that the
piece was included only because of “the documentary relevance to the Stevens poem that it evoked” (“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue”) and “is offered without the slightest pride of authorship.” Earlier in the preface he contextualizes his critical position at the time as an (admittedly naïve) American writer and critic of the far Left. Speaking of himself in the third person, Burnshaw writes: “He had also been advised that formal analysis could lead to futile complexities, and that a too-temperate stance was simply a foolish timidity. And yet, nobody had tried to speed up his slow ‘political’ development by flashing a party-membership card under his nose. And none of his words had ever been corrected by the red pencil of a commissar. He could do as he pleased—for he would do no wrong. Like the others around him he deeply believed in the necessity for promoting the Ultimate Good, whatever the circumstances. But within a year after writing the Stevens review, his private angel had pinned his shoulders to the ground. Until his departure, however, he continued to do as he had done, without wavering from his public position, perhaps hoping unconsciously that the very act of repeating beliefs might make them unquestionable for him” (26).
admired Stevens’s earlier collection, Harmonium18—referring to it as “mainly sense poetry,
but not as Keats’s is sense poetry”—criticized Stevens sharply for what he saw in Ideas of
Order to be a lack of engagement with social and political realities. Stevens’s once
“harmonious cosmos” is, according to Burnshaw, in his second collection, “suddenly screeching with confusion.” Ideas of Order, complained Burnshaw, is merely “the record of a man who, having lost his footing, now scrambles to stand up and find his balance” (30).
Despite the irrelevant political overtone to the critique—which would very shortly inspire Burnshaw to disown it—the review touches on a legitimate disjuncture in the work between the fictive world of the singular imagination and the social reality beyond it. The summary dismissal of the “confusion” that this disjuncture causes, however, overlooks the book’s most fundamental concern. “Will Stevens sweep his contradictory notions into a valid Idea of Order?” Burnshaw had asked—replying himself that the answer would depend not only on the “personal predisposition of the poet” but on the “alternatives” facing him as a poet. For Burnshaw in 1935, the disjuncture between social pressures and the life of the mind is one that can only be solved by deductive reasoning processes like those he
recognized within Harmonium—certainly not by the “confusions” and “contradictions” that pepper Ideas of Order. Published after a ten year silence (a silence that, unlike Oppen’s, had more to do with Stevens’s responsibilities at the Hartford Insurance company and as a new father than any overt artistic or political concerns) this highly anticipated collection was, as Burnshaw’s review makes apparent, initially misunderstood because of its refusal to adhere to the expectations of the more overtly socially and politically engaged poetry that
18 Burnshaw argued that in Harmonium Stevens manages to suffuse his sensory imagery with subjective
emotion—that the poetry is “scientific,” its sensuousness objectified: “separated from its kernel of fire, and allowed to settle, cool off, and harden in the poet’s mind until it emerges a strange amazing crystal” (29). Reading Stevens’s early poetry, Burnshaw concluded, “becomes a venture in crystallography” (29).
